“Thank you my Master,” Jones croaked, his insides were still healing, his pain still burning.
“Do not fail me again,” Sin warned.
“I won’t Master!” Jones cried, threw himself at Sin’s strange feet and began kissing them frantically.
Ewww! So gross!
Sin raised his chin with pride as his Second went to town covering every inch of the gnarly feet with wet, sloppy adoration.
Shit just got awkward. Come on guys, seriously? Get a room.
Sin really enjoyed it until he didn’t. “Enough!”
Jones backed off on all fours and timidly rose to his feet without looking up.
Bitch.
“Are you ready?” Sin asked Bobby.
No! Not ready! No way!
“Yep,” he gave Sin a thumbs up.
“You?” Sin directed the same question at Jones.
“Yes my Master.”
“Stick to the plan.”
The Reapers nodded.
“Wait for my signal.”
More head bobbing.
“No mercy. No quarter.”
Two nods, one less enthusiastic than the other.
“My brother is mine.”
7.
Snow was falling thick and heavy in Sea Cliff and Father Roman was doing his best to clear it from his beloved church’s sidewalk when his affinity for Guinness, bacon and all things deep fried finally caught up with him. His aorta, unable to withstand the pressure the hard work demanded of his old heart, exploded. Father Roman knew he was dead as soon as he felt the white hot bolt of pain in his chest and managed one final prayer as his body collapsed into the deepening snow, “Please God, forgive me my sins.”
“Hello my son,” Gordon greeted the soul of the priest as he rose from his corpse.
“Hello,” Father Roman smiled warmly. “Who are you?”
“This is Maria and I am your God,” Gordon replied with a matching grin.
Father Roman regarded the gray bearded, weather beaten man and his pretty companion and then the body that lay at his feet. “I’m dead?”
“Yes,” Maria replied gently.
“You’re God and you are…”
“Maria,” she smiled. “I’m an Angel.”
“So I am going to Heaven then?” the priest was as confused as the average newly dead but a lot less scared.
Gordon nodded.
“So you’re real?”
“Yes I am,” Gordon almost chuckled.
“God is real! Heaven is real! I’m going to Heaven!” the priest rejoiced, his excitement and his relief at not having worshipped a myth for his entire life had him buzzing.
Gordon smiled and nodded confirmation once again.
“You…you’re really him? The Almighty Father?”
“I am the one you worship, the one all worship,” Gordon threw the priest a curve.
Father Roman frowned.
“Every god is but one god,” Gordon put it as simply as he could.
The priest shook his head, it was either too much to handle or he refused to believe it.
“Don’t worry John, it doesn’t matter how you believe as long as you do, as long as you live a good and true life.”
“Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Mormons, you’re their God too?” Father Roman was a thinker and needed to understand what was being said even if it meant harassing God to get the answers he needed.
“Yes.”
“What about heathens, Rastafarians, Scientologists?” the portly priest obviously didn’t like what he was hearing.
“Everyone who lives by the will of their conscience, by what they feel is good and true in their hearts, is worshipping me. Everyone who believes in a power greater than themselves believes in me. I am the only god, the only creator, but I do not name myself. In every world, among every people, there are different beliefs, but there are few who understand the truth. I am everything. The air, the earth, you, Maria, time, space, love, snow. I am everything and everything is me.”
Father Roman shook his head as if a swarm of killer bees were trapped inside it.
“Don’t worry John, it will become clearer once you are home,” Gordon tried to ease the priest’s apparent confusion.
“Home?” Father Roman whispered.
“Heaven,” Maria clarified.
“Heaven,” the priest echoed with a bewildered smile.
“We will have time together and we can speak of this for as long as you wish,” Gordon assured the priest.
Father Roman nodded, his face relaxed at the idea of talking shop with god sunk in. “I’d like that very much,” he said.
“Too fucking bad fat boy!” Jones screamed as he grabbed the fear stricken priest and tossed him into the portal the two Reapers and Satan had just come out of.
“No!” Maria cried, drawing her sword and charging.
“Stop,” Gordon commanded and she did despite her urge to cleave the smiling creep who had just stolen the priest and stood sneering at her in two.
“Hello Esha,” Sin growled from where he loomed as the snow swirled around him, a toothy grin of delight sat plastered on his gruesome face.
“Hello brother,” Gordon replied.
“And what are you supposed to be?” Sin asked as he examined the object of uncountable millions of years of his hate.
“A fisherman,” Gordon answered.
“Pathetic!” Jones snarled.
“What are you supposed to be?” Maria chimed in, revulsion tainted her every word.
“I am Sin bitch! I am Satan! Lucifer! Shaitan! Beelzebub! Apollyon! Diabolus! The Prince of Darkness! The King of Hell! I am power! I am fear! I am hate!”
“Don’t forget ego,” the Angel snapped, unimpressed. “Oh and thief, liar, cheat, murderer, and of course, my favorite, prisoner.”
“Prisoner?” Sin roared and stepped toward her. “I am no prisoner.”
Maria didn’t flinch, she didn’t back down. “So you stay down there in that festering cesspool you created because you love it so much?” she asked with palatable disdain.
You go girl! Hot, sweet and a bad ass!
Bobby stood behind the raging giant, ready to strike when the time was right. He was terrified, amped up to the hundredth degree and as anxious as a rat in a snake pit.
“When I kill your Master I am going to let Jones have you,” Sin promised Maria.
“Thank you my Master,” Jones eyed the Angel like a starving hyena.
“You are here to kill me brother?” Gordon interrupted the schoolyard bickering.
Sin looked down at the old man with nothing but loathing, “Yes I am.”
Gordon shook his head in disappointment.
“You don’t approve?” Sin mocked.
Gordon raised his face to the tall, scaled creature, the blood red abomination that had once been his greatest friend, “I have missed you.”
“What?” Sin gasped.
“I miss you Sin,” Gordon’s clear blue eyes brimmed with tears. “I miss what we once were, who you were.”
“You’re such a bitch!” Jones roared.
Sin shot him a look that shut the Reaper up in an instant. “Don’t play your games with me Esha,” he growled at Gordon.
“It’s no game. We are brothers, we are supposed to love each other, to forgive each other. I love you Sin, I do now as I always have.”
“This love of yours, is it the same love that had you banish me? The same love that allows all to be forgiven except the one you claim to love the most?” Sin had waited a very long time to ask that particular question to his brother.
*
Wind howled around the corners of the church driving the heavy snow before it, an invisible shepherd herding a trillion white flakes in a chaotic stampede. Maria stood beside Gordon, her sword in hand. Jones cowered next to Sin, thirsty for her screaming. Bobby waited for Gordon’s answer, he wanted to hear it almost as bad as the creature who posed it.
“Nothing?” Sin goaded. “The great
Esha, God, Creator of all things, of all times, of all places, has no words of wisdom? No deep seeded philosophical bullshit? Not even a plain old excuse?”
“You tried to kill me,” Gordon whispered, the words cut short by the intensifying wind.
“Yes I did but I asked you for forgiveness brother,” Sin had relived the moment he described every day since it happened. “I begged you to forgive me.”
“You were too dangerous, too corrupt Sin,” Gordon replied without conviction.
“I asked for forgiveness!” Sin’s voice rose and his anger followed. “Forgiveness! That magical word of yours! That which you’ve offered to every being from every corner of every world. How many have asked and been denied? Just the one I think. Just your own brother, the one being capable of loving as you love, of sharing what only the two of us can share. I asked you to forgive me and you rejected me because you feared me. You feared me because you knew I was more than you, more than you could ever be. You refused me because you wanted what was rightfully mine, because you knew that if I stayed on Yoba then you would eventually have to face the truth. That you are the weak one. You are flawed. You are the one that corrupted all we created.”
“Have you lied to yourself for so long that you now believe it? All of this, all of it, is your doing. You wanted to rule. You wanted minions and slaves to heed your every word. You wanted to be worshipped. I did not create life so you could bend it to your will. I created life so the worlds I created could be enjoyed as I enjoy them. I created life so I would not have to be alone, so I could share my love and my joy. I created every living thing with a piece of myself inside them so they would know how to live, so they would know the power of love and so they would know the truth of life. You poisoned that, you ruined the utopia I tried to create.”
“Bullshit!” Sin roared. “You’re so wrapped up in your own bullshit you can’t even hear how idiotic you sound!’
Gordon shook his head, a look of loving pity darkened his snow pelted face.
“Don’t look at me like that!” Sin raged, stepping closer to the root of his hate. “Don’t look at me as if I am some dimwit incapable of grasping your crap philosophy. I can just as easily say that I am in everything, who’s to say I’m not?”
“You are brother, don’t you see it?” Gordon replied with all the patience of a doting father.
“What?” Sin looked as confused as the Pope in a whore house.
“You are inside them as I am,” Gordon replied with a smile.
“You see, that’s what I mean. The way you always try to confuse me, the way you make me feel less than you are.”
Gordon shook his head again, still smiling, still calm. “I am trying to help you,” he whispered.
“I don’t need your help!” Sin screamed so loud that the thick coating of snow that had settled on all of the branches, the cars, the roofs and the power lines within a mile of the demon avalanched simultaneously.
Sin crouched low, the snowstorm, now a blizzard by any meteorologist’s standards, danced around his daunting frame as if too scared to test his crimson scales. “You sicken me,” he seethed.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Gordon stood before the creature of nightmares without the slightest hint of the fear bubbling inside him.
“Sorry I feel that way, how about sorry you made me this way?” Sin growled, his voice thicker, his words raw with festering rage.
“I cannot be sorry for something I did not do. I can say it if you like but it would not satisfy you. Nothing I can say will satisfy you brother.”
Sin said nothing, hunkered low, coiled and readied to spring, “The truth will satisfy me.”
“The truth? The truth is that you are the reason the living suffer. You are the reason the afterlife is torn. You are the reason there is judgement.”
“Liar!” Sin roared.
“Truth Sin, I can only speak truth.” Gordon protested. “I wanted none of this Sin. I wanted all to live in harmony, in life and in death. You, brother, you created the divide.”
“Lie!” Sin roared. “You lie!”
Bobby tensed, his scythe ready. Maria’s delicate jaw clenched in anticipation.
“Before you betrayed me no living thing knew right from wrong because there was no wrong. You created it, you brought evil to life Sin. Every lie, every theft, every murder, everything bad in every world, in every existence is because of you. You infected the living with the poison of self. You doomed them all with your greed and your envy and your lust. You split them! You, brother, you are the cause of it all! You are the sickness, the blight, the plague that has ruined all I have created!” Gordon showed his anger for the first time, his loving eyes darkened, and his gentle smile gave way to a snarl that looked out of place on his kind face. “It must be easy to go around laying blame when it is you who should bear it all. I never intended to judge the living, to turn life into a trial or a test. There was never to be a consequence for living. Life was supposed to be a chance to grow and to love and to explore and to live. Death was only a way to shed the mortal worlds and join me in mine.”
“Blah! Blah! Blah! Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” Sin screamed spinning in a tight circle as if chasing an invisible tail. “All a lie, every word. Your precious creations are as flawed as you are.”
“You’d like it to be as you say but it is not,” Gordon watched the furious beast pace and twitch as his anger fought for freedom. “If you need me to be your reason to hate, to be your target then so be it, I am here. Before you strike me down I would ask only one thing brother…think. Think about this. I have never hated. I have never lied. I have never lusted for sex, for blood, for revenge or for riches. I do not wish sorrow or pain on anyone or anything. I do not judge. I do not reign. I do not condemn. I cannot teach what I do not know so therefore I am incapable of instilling such things in others. All of these things are of your creation, all of them came from you.
“You taught the innocent to reject the good within them, to deny what they knew to be right in order to feed their need of self. You infected the living with the same restless, insatiable greed that lives within you. All of what is wrong, all of what is broken, the pain and the turmoil that tortures every living thing, it was all born of you Sin.”
Sin stopped fidgeting and glared at his brother through eyes so cold the blizzard seemed tropical in comparison. “You speak of truth and of love and of forgiveness even as you stand here under a deception of your creation. This is a lie! You are a lie!” Sin spun and struck with the speed of a cobra, swatting Bobby in the back of his head and sending him sprawling face first into the snow before the Reaper knew he was even under attack.
Sin was roaring, the raw hate he spewed pierced Bobby’s brain like a red hot poker. Sin’s unexpected strike had nearly split his skull in two. The beast’s words and their implications echoed in the canyons of his rapidly swelling brain like a yodel through the Alps, “You try to trick me with this fool? You bait me with lies you claim incapable of! You lure me to this rock to do what brother? Talk? Hug it out?”
He knew. The fucker knew the whole time.
“Yes you fool, of course I knew. I heard your every thought, your mind is powerless to withhold its secrets from me! I am Sin! I am God!” Sin boasted loudly then leaned over Bobby and whispered. “Heal boy, I am not done with you yet.”
Bobby began to heal and the pain dwarfed that of the injury a thousand times over. He writhed in the snow, screaming silent screams as his skull knitted and his brain shriveled. Maria went to him despite the danger, slid an arm under his and hauled him to his feet.
“Isn’t that sweet Master?” Jones giggled mischievously. “I think they’ve got the hots for each other.”
“Good, they will have an eternity together, side by side, as I redefine pain to them both,” Sin smiled at his brother as he said it.
“You will not have them,” Gordon said plainly. “You will not have not a single one of my children ever again.”
Sin
threw his oversized head back and howled into the deluge of white in deep, guttural laughter. Jones mimicked him but with none of his power or conviction. Gordon waited patiently while Bobby regained his senses and shook off the last of the cobwebs in his freshly unscrambled brain. Maria stood ready to defend their lives with her own.
*
“You will not defeat me.”
“I will,” Gordon replied.
“You cannot! Look at me! Look at what I’ve become!” Sin spread his arms and flexed the mantle of muscle that adorned him.
Gordon looked at his brother with only pity and regret. “This form, this creature you hide inside, it proves nothing. I can match it, I can make myself greater, stronger, faster, more heinous but to what end brother? Do you want to trade blows for a thousand years? Knock me down and I will rise, as will you if I were to strike you. We are not mortal, we are not the same as these creatures. You know we cannot end each other in such a way. Have you forgotten the endless time we spent in battle, the wasted eons of needless fighting we endured only to stand as we had at the beginning? This is why we made our pact, remember? Had I foreseen what it would do I would never have allowed it.”
Sin said nothing. He stood still and silent, his eyes locked on Gordon’s.
“I could have killed you Sin, it would have taken but a moment but I did not want you to die. You are me and I am you, we are the same. To kill you would be to kill a part of myself. I could not. I love you brother.”
“It is your greatest weakness,” Sin sneered.
“Love is not a weakness,” Gordon smiled despite the hateful glare he received in return.
“We shall see. I have grown Esha! I have more power than you know. This time there will be an end to our fight. This time I will cut you down and shit on your corpse.”
Gordon shook his head, “Brother, you cannot defeat me. If you try then I must end this, I will have to end you. It has gone too far Sin. Too many have suffered because of my love for you.”
Sin studied the old man as he weighed his words. He knew his brother was incapable of fallacy but it had never stopped him from accusing him of it. But if God could not lie then his claim as to Sin’s inability to defeat him would be true. Sin’s pride refused to allow him to believe it. He would not tuck his tail and slither back to Hell. He would not cower, he would never relent in his quest to exact the revenge he had anticipated for so long. An idea bloomed and he seized it, “Our pact is broken.”
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